Author: admin

Who are you, and what do you do?

I'm Matt Lubchansky, and I'm an illustrator and cartoonist based in Queens, NY. I've been making my comic Please Listen to Me once a week since 2010. I'm the Editorial Assistant and a weekly contributor at The Nib. I've done freelance illustration work all over the place. I'm also the co-author of Dad Magazine (Quirk, 2016).

What hardware do you use?

At home, I work on a 21.5" 2015 iMac and a Cintiq Companion 2 tablet (13"). I switched to working digitally about 6 years ago and I basically never use paper anymore. I also have a Toshiba 13334 Chromebook 2 laying around that I use mostly for writing comics if I feel like I need to get away from my actual desk. When I've got to work out of an office or a friend's house or a hotel room or whatever, I rig up a little studio with the Chromebook and the Companion side by side. I end up writing all my ideas down on my iPhone in the middle of the night mostly.

And what software?

I try to get all my ideas down in Google Docs so I've got it on all my devices because I end up working all over the place. Every so often I'll write a script in TextEdit if I need to turn off the internet and just grind for a bit. I lay out panels, letter, sketch, and ink in Manga Studio EX 4, and then do all my colors in Photoshop CS6. Manga Studio 4 is pretty damn old and I'm pretty sure it's not even supported anymore, but I got very used to it before I went full-time as an artist and the learning curve of a new program freaks me out. Every so often it'll break and I have to plug a disc drive into my tablet and reinstall it with a physical install disc – one day it's definitely going to die and I'm going to have to go live in the woods.

What would be your dream setup?

In my wildest dreams I probably have one of those huge Thunderbolt displays with a Mac Pro and that stupidly massive 27" Cintiq that nobody actually needs. I've been working off a 13" Cintiq for years and having one of the giant ones with a huge articulated arm bolted to the wall sounds nice. For traveling, I'd honestly stick with the setup I have probably!

Who are you, and what do you do?

Hi! I'm Daniel Schauenberg and currently I'm a Staff Engineer on Etsy's fleet management and provisioning team. I've previously worked on the DevTools team at Etsy and in former jobs I was an embedded systems engineer and a network/systems administrator at a chemical plant before that.

What hardware do you use?

In terms of hardware I use an 11" MacBook Air as my personal laptop, and have the same model for work in conjunction with a 27" Thunderbolt Display, Apple Wireless Keyboard, and Apple Trackpad. It's honestly the best laptop I have ever owned, and I can't imagine ever going with a different size (although Apple's current laptop lineup suggests that I will have to at some point).

I recently acquired an iPhone SE after my trusty, almost 4 year old iPhone 5 got too slow, and I have a 1st gen iPad mini that I barely use. My phone is connected to a Pebble Time but I have most notifications disabled. I have a root server at Hetzner that hosts most of my stuff, an HP microserver at home for backups, and built my own homerouter on an apu1d4 board. And I love my YubiKeys (I have a 4 for work and a NEO for personal stuff) which I mostly use for 2FA on my servers and home router (via Duo Security) and for signing git commits.

And what software?

A lot of my work revolves around text files (code, journal, notes, ..) so the two pieces of software I probably interact with most are vim and git. Most of the time I write bash, Ruby, PHP or Go, and I use Make religiously to automate as much as possible, sign git commits with GPG, read email in mutt and generally live in a bunch of nested tmux sessions in a fullscreen iTerm2 terminal. I use Ledger for my accounting, which stays with the theme of being a bunch of text files, tracked in git, and automated with make.

For productivity and tracking what I have to do I rely a ton on OmniFocus, for which I have some scripts to pull in things from JIRA at work, GitHub issues (.com and our enterprise install), and email I need to reply to.

On my iPhone I mostly use Tweetbot, Instagram, Reeder (<3 RSS), Calm, and a combination of Working Copy and Editorial to clone git repos on my phone and take notes or write blog posts. I also use Pocket a lot, to the point where I had ~2000 articles backlogged. So I wrote a tool I called pocketcleaner which runs on one of my servers and trims down the list to the 20 newest entries every Sunday night.

What would be your dream setup?

I basically have my dream set up in a lot of ways. It would be awesome if I didn't have to charge my MacBook Air so often, and I would love it if macOS had kept closer to its UNIX roots. But otherwise I'm really enjoying my setup.